>- - The dedication. Who's Jose?
Jose (Josephine) Dolan, aka Mrs Hammett.
DH had split from Jose & the two daughters by the time
_TMF_ came out.
fwiw, the other novels are dedicated thus:
_Red Harvest_ Joe Shaw
editor of _Black Mask_ 1926-1936
_The Dain Curse_ Albert Samuels
jeweller, Hammett's employer during 1926
_Glass Key_ Nell Martin
Hammett's friend/lover (can we say 'mistress' in the late
1990s?).
Hammett moved to NY with Nell Martin in 1929.
_The Thin Man_ ? (dunno)
>- - The style. Pretty spare, but not like _The Glass
Key_. Also, the
>pulpiness of it shows through sometimes, like when
Hammett mentions
>Spade's muscled arms bulging through his
sleeves.
>
>- - The banter. Some good lines: "What do you want me
to do? Learn to
>stutter?" "When you're slapped, you'll take it and
like it."
A lot of the 'hard boiling' of _TMF_ occurs in the revision
for novel
publication.
Slight changes are made to language throughout the text; so
while 'hard
boiled' writing is inestricably associated with _Black Mask_,
one can
say the _Black Mask_ falcon isn't as hard-boiled as the novel
text...
>- - I don't think Spade is gay, or that Elsie's
intuition is very good.
I gotta ask --- who's Elsie? ;->
>- - The book and the Bogart movie are all jumbled up
in my head. I
>can't read it without remembering Bogie, Mary Astor,
Lorre, Greenstreet
>and Elisha Cook. This messes me up a bit on the
physical descriptions
>of Spade, because Bogart looks nothing like him.
Greenstreet wasn't
>fat enough, either.
Yeah, the 1941 film has a lot to answer for. Huston owes
quite a lot to
two the earlier film versions which, imo, influenced his film
about as
much as the novel.
Effie ought to have been played by a more overtly sexualised
actress
(the actress in the 1931 film was pretty well cast, and
played it sexier
than Lee Patrick). That first line that describes Effie, 'the
dress of
thick woollen stuff [that] clung to her with an effect of
dampness' puts
the casting way out, imo (though that line always makes me
think of
C12-13th Winchester School manuscript painting, with the
'damp' effect
in painting clothes fabric.) Who was a 1940s equivalent of
Kate Moss?
>- - What's the "Baumes rush"? Spade mentions this when
talking to Wilmer.
> Is it some homosexual thing?
I think it *might be* connected with boxing (so yeah, maybe
it _is_
'some homosexual thiing';->). Maybe there was a boxer
called Baume with
a distinctive style, or maybe Baume used it as an early type
of 'fly
like a butterfly, sting like a bee' hyperbolic posturing? (I
don't know
where I picked up this idea about boxing.)
_Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable_ makes no mention
of 'Baume's
Rush' (or 'bum's rush), and _Collin's English Dictionary_
refers only to
the Baume scale, for calibrating hydrometers, named after a
French
chemist.
ED
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